tmpfs port

["Alex Hornung" <ahornung@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

some time ago Nikita Glukhov ported, to some extent, tmpfs from FreeBSD to
Dragonfly. He seems to have abandoned the port, as I've been trying to
contact him for months without any luck.

I've recently imported his code into my git repository[1] and cleaned it up
so that it compiles properly and has the basic functionality it had. I don't
have the time at all to work on tmpfs right now, so it would be nice if
someone could take care of the code and make it work properly.
Good starting points are running fsx (which causes some vm pager issues) and
fstress, which are both in src/test, to start identifying issues. From the
original post in March, I also gather that there were some problems with
truncating files. Matt Dillon also offered some insight on how to improve
the performance once the basic functionality (e.g. the file system itself)
is done, on the original thread[2][3].

I'd hate to see this tmpfs port abandoned, so I really hope someone with
enough time will pick it up and complete it. tmpfs is a very nice memory
file system, much more memory efficient and even faster than mfs.

IMHO this project would also be great for someone who wants to start
contributing to DragonFly and is looking to get some first insight into some
parts of the operating system. There is a lot of help available both on the
mailing lists and on the IRC channel (#dragonflybsd on efnet).


Cheers,
Alex Hornung

[1]:
http://gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/~alexh/dragonfly.git/shortlog/refs/heads/tmpf
s
[2]: http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/kernel/2009-03/msg00095.html
[3]: http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/kernel/2009-03/msg00104.html